Sacai’s Chitose Abe Has Won the Respect of the Fashion World

What does it feel like to wear a Sacai jacket? Well, to answer that question with another question: Which part? On a recent Saturday afternoon, I browsed the Sacai section at the department store of avant-garde dreams, Dover Street Market in Manhattan, where I threw on the peacoat-and-bomber-jacket combo from the label’s fall 2017 collection. This is no simple piece of outerwear, but two jackets in one. The bomber acts as the lining to a classic navy peacoat, its shearling hood bisected by a zipper so that when undone, it lies like a stole across the shoulders. On the inside, the jacket feels warm but light, the elegant construction belying the weight of the combined layers; on the outside, it’s the perfect item for a woman who hates to have to choose. The bomber evolved from jackets worn by military pilots in World War II; today it’s a streetwear staple. The peacoat, too, is associated with British naval officers and has become a standby of cold-weather dressing. Sacai’s jacket has everything at once: the sky and the sea, the historical and the contemporary; it is truly timeless, referencing legacies while being entirely of this moment.

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The scene at the Sacai x Undercover show at Tokyo Fashion Week.

Courtesy of Sacai/Undercover

It’s a wearable metaphor for the independent Tokyo-based brand itself—and for its designer, Chitose Abe, a woman with a considerable fashion legacy of her own. She began her career working for Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons and, as a patternmaker, reported to Junya Watanabe. When Watanabe started his own label, he asked Abe to join him. In 1997, she left to raise her daughter, and in 1999, she started a simple line of knitwear called Sacai—a play on her maiden name, Sakai. Her first runway show wasn’t until 2012, but the slow and steady process is one that Abe values. Over the years, her clothes have become more conceptual and confident, increasingly ornate but retaining a consistent look, so that her clients can trust a single piece to carry multiple meanings.

I spoke to Abe on the phone (through a translator, since her English is limited). She was in her office in Tokyo, where I could hear her pause to consider her answers before responding in a way that managed to be both swift and measured. She told me that she thinks often of how, both in fashion and in our world, “everything is progressing really quickly.” Instead of maintaining a relentless pace, she prefers to take her work in stride.

That tempo is paying off. Sacai is a mainstay of high-end boutiques and department stores, such as Ikram and Barneys. Meanwhile, her admirers include some of the most powerful people in the industry, like Karl Lagerfeld, who has spoken at length about his respect for her work. Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, believes that Abe is becoming a major influence; by coincidence, Steele happens to be wearing Sacai as we speak. She considers Abe’s work both avant-garde and easy to wear, a paradox the clothes carry with grace. “I can see the influence of Comme des Garçons in Sacai,” she says, “but it’s subtle—there is the sense of deconstructing fashion and reassembling it.” For Steele, the line remains singular in the way it subverts so-called normal construction. To put it bluntly: Most jackets are only one kind of jacket; most button-down shirts don’t have a panel in the back with sharply precise pleats; and most sweatshirt dresses don’t have a skirt made of tulle. Then again, most jackets, shirts, and dresses are not Sacai.

Sofia Coppola first saw Sacai on a photo shoot and fell in love with the pieces based on men’s shirts. She tells me she always makes a point to visit the store when she’s in Tokyo, drawn in by the “fabrics, flowing backs, and all the interesting details, but when you wear them, they still feel easy. It always feels special to get her clothes.”

Abe has also collaborated with some of the most accessible sportswear brands. In each partnership, a clear pattern emerges, in which Abe brings her open mind to a fixed item of clothing: For her take on a winter jacket from The North Face, she created overlapping textures—a collar under a hood, fabric panels—and multiple pocket compartments; at Lacoste, she embellished preppy polo shirts with her recognizable pinstripe panels; at Converse, she gave classic canvas sneakers a lowercase logo and fuzzy navy laces; and she remade Nike’s athleticwear to look light and fast, even with exaggerated silhouettes and voluminous cuts. Each time, she honored the brand’s classic roots but showed that its pieces were capable of carrying her elaborate or irreverent details. Abe’s collaborations fit perfectly into fashion’s ongoing movement of using mass-market brands in increasingly rarefied ways—think of Vetements giving Champion and DHL the avant-garde stamp of approval, or Telfar’s partnership with White Castle. It’s clothing for people who don’t want to look like everyone else but still want a connection to the ordinary.

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Sneakers from Sacai’s Converse collaboration.

Courtesy of the designer

Sometimes, Abe told me, her design team would see her wear a brand to the office and wonder if that meant she was considering a collaboration. But “there is no real strategy in how and when these collaborations come about,” she insists. “It’s often based on my personal intuition. There has to be genuine interest or connection in order for me to create something new and unexpected.” Her only rule is that these partnerships are just that—she expects herself and the brands to each contribute exactly half the work. Sacai devotees go absolutely wild for the finished results: In September, Colette hosted a monthlong residency called Jardin Sacai. Hundreds of people anxiously awaited their turn to purchase the many limited-edition collaborations exclusive to the Parisian retailer, available for only a brief moment in one place.

Ikram Goldman, the owner of Ikram in Chicago, has been carrying Sacai since 2003. She admires Abe’s distinctly feminine sensibility, one she describes as “pure girl”: simultaneously pretty yet sexy, playful, and surprising. “A designer like Chitose is always going to challenge herself and submerge herself in a question. It’s always going to be, But why? But where? But when? But how? It’s never just a piece of lace. It’s, What does the lace do?”

Looks from Sacai’s spring 2018 show in Paris.

Courtesy of the designer

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As both designer and CEO, Abe is able to make every creative and financial decision on her own. An independent brand is a rarity in an industry increasingly dominated by conglomerates, and while freedom comes with increased responsibilities and pressures, it is, she says, worth it. She puts herself in Sacai, both as a business and a craft, and hopes that the women who wear her clothes can feel like themselves in her clothes as well. Goldman, who visited Abe in Japan a few years ago, spoke about watching her at work: “She looks through every bill. She signs every check. She goes through every garment in the store.”

Abe, who is 52, will soon be celebrating the 20-year anniversary of her brand, a reflective time for herself and for what she’s created. Over the decades, Sacai has sometimes been referred to as a “cult sensation,” which implies a hidden or secret quality. In truth, the line is neither clandestine nor unseen; Abe has been critically acclaimed and commercially successful. But her brand does occupy a rare position in the fashion industry: Much like the clothes she makes, Abe gets to have everything in one—commercial but still cool. She balances the needs of a demanding industry with her own sense of direction. In doing so, Abe has achieved the kind of fan base often associated with much more exclusive or esoteric designers. The people who line up for her work do so because she has earned their complete trust. No matter the season or the iconic brand she’s paired with, Abe always gives her expectant followers the unexpected.

Jason Lloyd-Evans

Diana Tsui, senior market editor for The Cut, bought her first piece of Sacai, a gray asymmetrical skort, in 2014, after years of following the brand’s evolution. When you wear Sacai, she says, “you have to be secure in your sense of style and in being the odd one out in a group.”

That distinctive strangeness is one of Sacai’s central contradictions. It is, in many ways, a practical line of wearable pieces—“If you have a PTA meeting, you can still wear Sacai” to it, the designer once told the Washington Post. Abe knows, however, that practical doesn’t mean minimal. Her work is loaded with complex trademarks—which include pleated pinstripe inserts, plaids, camouflage and corsetry details, biker jackets, and the rare animal print—but perhaps her most consistent calling card is the sense of surprise or delight contained within a single item.

The result is a clothing line that manages to be at once emotional and practical, intuitive and intimate. Abe designs with a kind of tactile empathy, thinking carefully about what materials will convey the depth of feeling her women experience. Happiness, joy, love: Sacai communicates the feelings Abe reflects on while she works, both in her own life and in the life she imagines of the woman waiting for her next collection. When I wore that Sacai jacket and looked in the mirror, I could see a version of myself that this jacket belonged to; I saw, too, a version of myself that would own the jacket forever, and still find something new every time I put it on.